Critical Podium Dewanand

A PRACTICAL MAN'S PROOF OF GOD

The existence of God is a subject that has occupied
schools of philosophy and theology for thousands of
years. Most of the time, these debates have revolved
around all kinds of assumptions and definitions.
Philosophers will spend a lifetime arguing about the
meaning of a word and never really get there. One is
reminded of the college student who was asked how his
philosophy class was going. He replied that they had
not done much because when the teacher tried to call
roll, the kids kept arguing about whether they existed
or not.

Most of us who live and work in the real world do not
concern ourselves with such activities. We realize
that such discussions may have value and interest in
the academic world, but the stress and pressure of
day-to-day life forces us to deal with a very
pragmatic way of making decisions. If I ask you to
prove to me that you have $2.00, you would show it to
me. Even in more abstract things we use common sense
and practical reasoning. If I ask you whether a
certain person is honest or not, you do not flood the
air with dissertations on the relative nature of
honesty; you would give me evidence one way or the
other. The techniques of much of the philosophical
arguments that go on would eliminate most of
engineering and technology if they were applied in
those fields.

The purpose of this brief study is to offer a logical,
practical, pragmatic proof of the existence of God
from a purely scientific perspective. To do this, we
are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and
that the matter of which we are made is real. If you
do not believe that you exist, you have bigger
problems than this study will entail and you will have
to look elsewhere.

THE BEGINNING

If we do exist, there are only two possible
explanations as to how our existence came to be.
Either we had a beginning or we did not have a
beginning. The Bible says, "In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1 :1). The
atheist has always maintained that there was no
beginning. The idea is that matter has always existed
in the form of either matter or energy; and all that
has happened is that matter has been changed from form
to

form, but it has always been. The Humanist Manifesto
says, "Matter is self-existing and not created," and
that is a concise statement of the atheist's belief.

The way we decide whether the atheist is correct or
not is to see what science has discovered about this
question. The picture below on the left represents our
part of the cosmos. Each of the disk shaped objects is
a galaxy like our Milky Way. All of these galaxies are
moving relative to each other. Their movement has a
very distinct pattern which causes the distance
between the galaxies to get greater with every passing
day. If we had three galaxies located at positions A,
B. and C in the second diagram below, and if they are
located as shown, tomorrow they will be further apart.
The triangle they form will be bigger. The day after
tomorrow the triangle will be bigger yet. We live in
an expanding universe that gets bigger and bigger and
bigger with every passing day.

Picture 1: see attachment

Now let us suppose that we made time run backwards! If
we are located at a certain distance today, then
yesterday we were closer together. The day before
that, we were still closer. Ultimately, where must all
the galaxies have been? At a point! At the beginning!
At what scientists call a singularity!

A second proof is seen in the energy sources that fuel
the cosmos. The picture to the right is a picture of
the sun. Like all stars, the sun generates its energy
by a nuclear process known as thermonuclear fusion.
Every second that passes, the sun compresses 564
million tons of hydrogen into 560 million tons of
helium with 4 million tons of matter released as
energy. In spite of that tremendous consumption of
fuel, the sun has only used up 2% of the hydrogen it
had the day it came into existence. This incredible
furnace is not a process confined to the sun. Every
star in the sky generates its energy in the same way.
Throughout the cosmos there are 25 quintillion stars,
each converting hydrogen into helium, thereby reducing
the total amount of hydrogen in the cosmos. Just think
about it! If everywhere in the cosmos hydrogen is
being consumed and if the process has been going on
forever, how much hydrogen should be left?

Picture 2: see attachment

Suppose I attempt to drive my automobile without
putting any more gas (fuel) into it. As I drive and
drive, what is eventually going to happen? I am going
to run out of gas I If the cosmos has been here
forever, we would have run out of hydrogen long ago!
The fact is, however, that the sun still has 98% of
its original hydrogen. The fact is that hydrogen is
the most abundant material in the universe! Everywhere
we look in space we can see the hydrogen 21 cm line in
the spectrum_a piece of light only given off by
hydrogen. This could not be unless we had a beginning!

A third scientific proof that the atheist is wrong is
seen in the second law of thermodynamics. In any
closed system, things tend to become disordered. If an
automobile is driven for years and years without
repair, for example, it will become so disordered that
it would not run any more. Getting old is simple
conformity to the second law of thermodynamics. In
space, things also get old. Astronomers refer to the
aging process as heat death. If the cosmos is
"everything that ever was or is or ever will be," as
Dr. Carl Sagan is so fond of saying, nothing could be
added to it to improve its order or repair it. Even a
universe that expands and collapses and expands again
forever would die because it would lose light and heat
each time it expanded and rebounded.

The atheist's assertion that matter/energy is eternal
is scientifically wrong. The biblical assertion that
there was a beginning is scientifically correct.

THE CAUSE

If we know the creation has a beginning, we are faced
with another logical question_was the creation caused
or was it not caused? The Bible states, "In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Not
only does the Bible maintain that there was a cause_a
creation_but it also tells us what the cause was. It
was God. The atheist tells us that "matter is
self-existing and not created." If matter had a
beginning and yet was uncaused, one must logically
maintain that something would have had to come into
existence out of nothing. From empty space with no
force, no matter, no energy, and no intelligence,
matter would have to become existent. Even if this
could happen by some strange new process unknown to
science today, there is a logical problem.

In order for matter to come out of nothing, all of our
scientific laws dealing with the conservation of
matter/energy would have to be wrong, invalidating all
of chemistry. All of our laws of conservation of
angular momentum would have to be wrong, invalidating
all of physics. All of our laws of conservation of
electric charge would have to be wrong, invalidating
all of electronics and demanding that your TV set not
work!! Your television set may not work, but that is
not the reason! In order to believe matter is
uncaused, one has to discard known laws and principles
of science. No reasonable person is going to do this
simply to maintain a personal atheistic position.

The atheist's assertion that matter is eternal is
wrong. The atheist's assertion that the universe is
uncaused and selfexisting is also incorrect The
Bible's assertion that there was a beginning which was
caused is supported strongly by the available
scientific evidence.

THE DESIGN

If we know that the creation had a beginning and we
know that the beginning was caused, there is one last
question for us to answer--what was the cause? The
Bible tells us that God was the cause. We are further
told that the God who did the causing did so with
planning and reason and logic. Romans 1:20 tells us
that we can know God is

"through the things he has made." The atheist, on the
other hand, will try to convince us that we are the
product of chance. Julian Huxley once said:

We are as much a product of blind forces as is the
falling of a stone to earth or the ebb and flow of the
tides. We have just happened, and man was made flesh
by a long series of singularly beneficial accidents.

The subject of design has been one that has been
explored in many different ways. For most of us,
simply looking at our newborn child is enough to rule
out chance. Modern-day scientists like Paul Davies and
Frederick Hoyle and others are raising elaborate
objections to the use of chance in explaining natural
phenomena. A principle of modern science has emerged
in the 1980s called "the anthropic principle." The
basic thrust of the anthropic principle is that chance
is simply not a valid mechanism to explain the atom or
life. If chance is not valid, we are constrained to
reject Huxley's claim and to realize that we are the
product of an intelligent God.

THE NEXT STEP

We have seen a practical proof of God's existence in
this brief study. A flood of questions arise at this
point. Which God are we talking about? Where did God
come from? Why did God create us? How did God create
us?

All of these and many more are answered in the same
way_by looking at the evidence in a practical, common
sense way. If you are interested in pursuing these
things in more detail, we invite you to contact us. We
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